Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/191

common people. To many noble, progressive thinkers of the time, the abolition movement seemed full of injustice to property-holders at North and South. They feared also the violent disruption and riots sure to result from the radical application of such principles. Many shared Hawthorne's feeling,—and many share it to-day with added strength after the conflict has left its after math of tragic race-problems,—we "could not see the thing at so long a range." Few of the reformers knew much of the actual status at the South from any personal inspection. Many of the criticisms and some of the proposed measures were not alone rabid but fraught with danger to the nation. The movement, however, in the main, was the natural outgrowth of the spirit of freedom, bodily, mental, and religious, which swept over the world during the last century. Emphasis of the latent good in all men, and their possible progress in mind and soul, fostered this primal defiance to bondage of the negroes. The abolitionists held a convention in Concord in 1844. The churches refused to open their doors, so the meeting was held in the Court-House. Thoreau asked for and gained permission for its use and he rang the bell, with all the vigor of muscle which was his, and Emerson made a thrilling address advo-